On May 31st, president Barack Obama strolled into the bright sunlight of the Rose Garden, covered from head to toe in the slime and ooze of the Benghazi and IRS scandals. In a Karl Rove-ian masterstroke, he simply pretended they weren't there and changed the subject.

The topic? Student loans. Unless Congress took action soon, he warned, the relatively low 3.4 percent interest rates on key federal student loans would double. Obama knew the Republicans would make a scene over extending the subsidized loan program, and that he could corner them into looking like obstructionist meanies out to snatch the lollipop of higher education from America's youth. "We cannot price the middle class or folks who are willing to work hard to get into the middle class," he said sternly, "out of a college education."

Flash-forward through a few months of brinkmanship and name-calling, and not only is nobody talking about the IRS anymore, but the Republicans and Democrats are snuggled in bed together on the student-loan thing, having hatched a quick-fix plan on July 31st to peg interest rates to Treasury rates, ensuring the rate for undergrads would only rise to 3.86 percent for the coming year.

Though this was just the thinnest of temporary solutions – Congressional Budget Office projections predicted interest rates on undergraduate loans under the new plan would still rise as high as 7.25 percent within five years, while graduate loans could reach an even more ridiculous 8.8 percent – the jobholders on Capitol Hill couldn't stop congratulating themselves for their "rare" "feat" of bipartisan cooperation. "This proves Washington can work," clucked House Republican Luke Messer of Indiana, in a typically autoerotic assessment of the work done by Beltway pols like himself who were now freed up for their August vacations.

Not only had the president succeeded in moving the goal posts on his spring scandals, he'd teamed up with the Republicans to perpetuate a long-standing deception about the education issue: that the student-loan controversy is now entirely about interest rates and/or access to school loans.

Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of student rights by taking on banks and greedy lenders like Sallie Mae. Three years earlier, he'd scored what at the time looked like a major victory over the Republicans with a transformative plan to revamp the student-loan industry. The 2010 bill mostly eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student-loan business. Henceforth, the government would lend college money directly to students, with no middlemen taking a cut. The president insisted the plan would eliminate waste and promised to pass the savings along to students in the form of more college and university loans, including $36 billion in new Pell grants over 10 years for low-income students. Republican senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander bashed the move as "another Washington takeover."

The thing is, none of it – not last month's deal, not Obama's 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It's not the cost of the loan that's the problem, it's the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.

How is this happening? It's complicated. But throw off the mystery and what you'll uncover is a shameful and oppressive outrage that for years now has been systematically perpetrated against a generation of young adults. For this story, I interviewed people who developed crippling mental and physical conditions, who considered suicide, who had to give up hope of having children, who were forced to leave the country, or who even entered a life of crime because of their student debts.

They all take responsibility for their own mistakes. They know they didn't arrive at gorgeous campuses for four golden years of boozing, balling and bong hits by way of anybody's cattle car. But they're angry, too, and they should be. Because the underlying cause of all that later-life distress and heartache – the reason they carry such crushing, life-alteringly huge college debt – is that our university-tuition system really is exploitative and unfair, designed primarily to benefit two major actors.

First in line are the colleges and universities, and the contractors who build their extravagant athletic complexes, hotel-like dormitories and God knows what other campus embellishments. For these little regional economic empires, the federal student-loan system is essentially a massive and ongoing government subsidy, once funded mostly by emotionally vulnerable parents, but now increasingly paid for in the form of federally backed loans to a political constituency – low- and middle-income students – that has virtually no lobby in Washington.

Phil Murphy, a former banker with a double-digit lead in New Jersey’s race for governor, has made a state-owned bank a centerpiece of his platform. If he wins on November 7, the nation’s second state-owned bank in a century could follow.

More than three-quarters of the MPs surveyed incorrectly believed that only the government has the ability to create new money. . . .

The Bank of England has previously intervened to point out that most money in the UK begins as a bank loan. In a 2014 article the Bank pointed out that “whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.”

The Bank of England researchers said that 97% of the UK money supply is created in this way. In the US, the figure is about 95%. City A.M. quoted Fran Boait, executive director of the advocacy group Positive Money, who observed:

“Despite their confidence in telling the public that there is ‘no magic money tree’ to pay for vital services, politicians themselves are shockingly ignorant of where money actually comes from.

“There is in fact a ‘magic money tree’, but it’s in the hands of commercial banks, such as Barclays, HSBC and RBS, who create money whenever they make loans.”

For those few politicians who are aware of the banks’ magic money tree, the axiom that the people should own the banks – or at least some of them – is a no-brainer. One of these rare politicians is Phil Murphy, who has a double-digit lead in New Jersey’s race for governor. Formerly a Wall Street banker himself, Murphy knows how banking works. That helps explain why he has boldly made a state-owned bank a centerpiece of his platform. He maintains that New Jersey’s billions in tax dollars should be kept in the state’s own bank, where it can leverage its capital to fund local infrastructure, small businesses, affordable housing, student loans, and other state needs. New Jersey voters go to the polls on November 7.

Editor's Note: It is sold as a convenience, like every other form of control foisted on humanity but it's NOT A GOOD IDEA. The bankers already have almost total control over us. Let them do this and game over.

When Hurricane Maria knocked out power in Puerto Rico, residents there realized they were going to need physical cash — and a lot of it.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the Fed was forced to fly a planeload of cash to the Island to help avert disaster:

William Dudley, the New York Fed president, put the word out within minutes, and ultimately a jet loaded with an undisclosed amount of cash landed on the stricken island...

[Business executive in Puerto Rico] described corporate clients’ urgent requests for hundreds of thousands in cash to meet payrolls, and the challenge of finding enough armored cars to satisfy endless demand at ATMs. Such were the days after Maria devastated the U.S. territory last month, killing 39 people, crushing buildings and wiping out the island’s energy grid. As early as the day after the storm, the Fed began working to get money onto the island,

For a time, unless one had a hoard of cash stored up in one's home, it was impossible to get cash at all. 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power, as of October 9. Bloomberg continues: "When some generator-powered ATMs finally opened, lines stretched hours long, with people camping out in beach chairs and holding umbrellas against the sun."

Now It’s Fabricated or Unenforceable Student Loansby Neil Garfield
The CFPB laid down some serious fines on National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts and its debt collector, Transworld Systems, Inc. The firms were collectively ordered to pay $26.1 million for attempting to collect on loans that were at best out of date and at worst nonexistent.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) specifically alleges that the firms would drag “borrowers” into court or pursue aggressive collection actions on consumers whose debts had already expired — or on debts that they could not actually prove were owed. The action against the entities further alleges that they relied on false and misleading legal documents to compel funds out of consumers illegally.

{Editor's Note: Same dog, different house. When will the CFPB start prosecuting the same crimes and other illegal acts that lie at the heart of nearly all foreclosures?}

The CFPB laid down some serious fines on National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts and its debt collector, Transworld Systems, Inc. The firms were collectively ordered to pay $26.1 million for attempting to collect on loans that were at best out of date and at worst nonexistent.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) specifically alleges that the firms would drag “borrowers” into court or pursue aggressive collection actions on consumers whose debts had already expired — or on debts that they could not actually prove were owed. The action against the entities further alleges that they relied on false and misleading legal documents to compel funds out of consumers illegally.

All in all, the trust filed nearly 500 lawsuits (486 at current count, though that number could climb) on debts where the statute of limitations for collections had already expired — totaling about $3.5 million in funds collected from consumers that they arguably no longer owed.

National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts is comprised of 15 trusts that own more than 800,000 private student loans in total. In the years before the financial crisis — when the world started taking a much more jaundiced look at the practice — the firm specialized in buying up student loans and packaging out those loans to investors.

And — like the subprime mortgage loans whose securitization brought on the housing bubble and the resultant recession — the paperwork associated with National Collegiate securitized student loans was often flawed or incomplete, according to the CFPB.

Harm to Consumers

Those debts, the CFPB noted in its complaint, had extremely pernicious results for consumers. Reports indicated that the debt collection agency filed nearly 95,000 lawsuits across the country between 2012 and 2016.

In 2,000 suits, National Collegiate could neither produce proof of ownership of the debt nor a promissory note, which borrowers sign promising to repay the loan. Despite being unable to produce those documents necessary to validate their debt, Transworld employees nonetheless signed sworn affidavits claiming to have reviewed account records they never read — and even, at times, had interns and mailroom clerks execute affidavits when there were backlogs.

Borrowers paid $21 million in judgments against them.

The trust’s collection practices were so extreme that Donald Uderitz, the founder of private equity firm Vantage Capital Group (VCG) and beneficial owner of the trusts (his company receives any money remaining after noteholders are paid), became concerned enough to bring in an auditor in 2015 to review the work of the company charged with handling loan payments and maintaining custody of the loan documents.

The End of a Long Investigation

The new settlements come after a three-year investigation — and still must be signed off on by a federal judge.

Uderitz noted that they collaborated with the CFPB on the agreement and they would work with the agency “to finish the job.”

”We frankly welcomed the intervention of the CFPB to help us to put an end to these appalling practices,” he said.

Transworld will pay a $2.5 million fine and take other measures “in order to avoid costly and potentially protracted litigation with our primary regulator,” it said in a statement.

The trust — as is standard practice — has neither admitted nor denied the CFPB finding, but has affirmed that its business practices “adhere to all federal and state consumer protection laws and embody best practices in the industry.”

Student loan debt, however, remains something of a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the economy. As of the end of Q2, 11.2 percent of all outstanding student loan debt was 90 days past due or defaulted, a greater proportion than for credit cards and mortgages, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

The CFPB has also been recently making noises about toughening regulation on debt collectors, due to the annual tidal wave of complaints from consumers about illegal and harassing practices by various debt collectors.

Talk about a nightmare. It is being reported that criminals were able to hack into Equifax and make off with the credit information of 143 million Americans.

We are talking about names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and even driver’s license numbers. If this data breach was an earthquake, we would be talking about a magnitude-10.0 on the identity theft scale. We have never seen anything like this before, and to say that this will be “disastrous” for the credit industry would be a massive understatement.

Credit monitoring company Equifax has been hit by a high-tech heist that exposed the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information about 143 million Americans. Now the unwitting victims have to worry about the threat of having their identities stolen.

The Atlanta-based company, one of three major U.S. credit bureaus, said Thursday that “criminals” exploited a U.S. website application to access files between mid-May and July of this year.

So why didn’t we learn about this until September?

Somebody out there really needs to answer that question for us.

And even though the “143 million” number is being thrown around constantly, according to USA Today we may never know the true number of victims…

When asked if there’s a way to quantify how many people have been harmed, John Ulzheimer, a credit expert and former employee at Equifax and credit score firm FICO, said: “There’s no way to know, and there may never be a way to know.”

Personally, I don’t see how Equifax can possibly survive after this. Their stock price is already crashing, and now it has come out that they had put a “music major” in charge of data security…

When Congress hauls in Equifax CEO Richard Smith to grill him, it can start by asking why he put someone with degrees in music in charge of the company’s data security.

And then they might also ask him if anyone at the company has been involved in efforts to cover up Susan Mauldin’s lack of educational qualifications since the data breach became public.

It would be fascinating to hear Smith try to explain both of those extraordinary items.

Also, we are now finding out that Equifax has not just had security problems here in the United States.

According to the New York Post, data breaches have been taking place all over the globe…

Hackers had access to the names, dates of birth and e-mail addresses of nearly 400,000 people in the United Kingdom, said Equifax’s British subsidiary in a statement last week.

In Canada, sensitive data belonging to 10,000 consumers may have been hacked in the breach, said a statement from the Canadian Automobile Association.

In Argentina, one of the company’s portals was so easily accessible that it allowed quick exposure to the personal information of more than 14,000 people.

As noted above, the public didn’t learn about any of this until September.

But once top Equifax officials learned what had happened, some of them started dumping their shares of Equifax very rapidly…

Three Equifax executives — not the ones who are departing — sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million just a few days after the company discovered the breach, according to documents filed with securities regulators.

Equifax shares have lost a third of their value since it announced the breach.

Needless to say, the SEC is going to be looking into this very closely.

As we move forward, there is a tremendous amount of concern as to how much this data breach will affect the U.S. economy.

Only time will tell, but without a doubt it will have an impact. For example, according to Bloomberg this data breach could potentially have an absolutely disastrous impact on store-branded credit cards…

Those retailers’ banking partners, including Synchrony Financial and Alliance Data Systems Corp., could see fewer account originations as more consumers freeze their credit to avoid hack-related fraud. Consumers have to take extra steps — including calling the credit bureau, going online or paying fees — to lift a block and get a new card.

“If people are defaulting to credit freezes, then if you’re a Macy’s retailer trying to sell credit cards, you can’t get that done at the point of sale,” said Vincent Caintic, an analyst at Stephens Inc. “It could become a regular thing, these freezes. It does slow down the origination process and it’s probably going to increase acquisition costs.”

If you believe that your data may have been compromised in this breach, there are some things that you can do right away to help protect against identity theft. You can sign up for 24 hour a day credit monitoring, you can request fraud alerts, you can enable “two factor authentication” and beyond all of that you could go as far as to freeze your credit.

But if everybody in America suddenly started freezing their credit, that would slow down economic activity dramatically. So needless to say authorities are hoping that does not happen.

In this case, Equifax needs to step up and do the right thing. They need to inform all of the victims (even if that means reaching out to 143 million different people), and they should automatically provide free credit monitoring for all of those that were affected.

I seriously doubt that Equifax will take these measures, and I also seriously doubt that Equifax will be able to survive much longer.

When you bungle something as badly as Equifax has done, it is nearly impossible to restore faith in an organization. The credit information of 143 million Americans is now in the hands of criminals, and the potential damage that could be done is absolutely off the charts.

Editor's Note: Wells Fargo has admitting massive amounts of fraud but it suffers ZERO CONSEQUENCES, as is the same for all the so-called "too big to fail banks." It's time we stopped waiting for the gubermint to do something about it because they will not. They are bought and paid for by the banks. The solution is very simple. We don't need anyone else to help us. Simply take all your money out of these banks and put it into your local community bank or credit union. Then the big banks will crash and burn as they should have a long time ago.

Wells Fargo on Thursday disclosed that its fake accounts scandal affected up to 3.5 million customers in total, far more than the 2.1 million accounts it previously said were possibly opened without customers’ knowledge.

The San Francisco-based bank first acknowledged in September 2016 that employees opened scores of unauthorized accounts since 2011. It subsequently revamped its pay structure and eliminated sales goals, moving away from policies that encouraged branch employees to open multiple accounts for customers. After news reports indicated that the problem dated back to 2009, Wells Fargo launched a new review of account data.

Wells Fargo said the third-party review revealed up to 1.4 million additional fake accounts, and the total number of accounts that incurred fees and charges grew to 190,000. The bank will provide another $2.8 million in refunds and credits on top of the $3.3 million it already refunded to affected customers.

Also, Wells Fargo said 528,000 customers were enrolled in its online bill pay service without signing up for it. Those customers will receive a combined $910,000 in refunds.

“We apologize to everyone who was harmed by unacceptable sales practices that occurred in our retail bank,” Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan said in a statement.

Editor's Note: Wells Fargo has admitting massive amounts of fraud but it suffers ZERO CONSEQUENCES, as is the same for all the so-called "too big to fail banks." It's time we stopped waiting for the gubermint to do something about it because they will not. They are bought and paid for by the banks. The solution is very simple. We don't need anyone else to help us. Simply take all your money out of these banks and put it into your local community bank or credit union. Then the big banks will crash and burn as they should have a long time ago.

The creation of fake accounts and fake services comes as no surprise to anyone who has been involved in foreclosure defense. As usual the response from Wells Fargo was a blatant lie. It wasn't 2.1 MILLION fake accounts that were opened, it is now 3.5 MILLION fake accounts and there is more to come. Oh, and another 528,000 customers of Wells Fargo also got signed up for BillPay when they didn't ask for it.

The point of all this is that Wells Fargo figured correctly that the penalty was worth the gain. By fraudulently expanding its reported portfolio of accounts and services, Wells Fargo had falsely represented a key indicator of its growth and health, causing its stock price to rise. The end result is a few million dollars in "refunds" while the increase in the stock price was worth billions.

Most people, whether they are Judges, lawyers or consumers, want to believe that the banks run on trust. But in fact, while the smaller and mid-sized banks run on trust, the large banks have made fraud a customary industry-standard practice. Let me put it this way --- it is industry standard practice to violate banking and lending laws.

Hence my admonition to avoid "admitting" anything the banks say in litigation --- even the representation that the lawyer has a client or that the plaintiff is the plaintiff. The banks correctly anticipated that judges would come to the conclusion that foreclosure defense was a scam. In order to "move their

The banks correctly anticipated that judges would come to the conclusion that foreclosure defense was a scam. In order to "move their docket" they ruled in ways that would virtually guarantee that the bank or servicer would get the foreclosure sale. Swamped by millions of foreclosures (which despite popular belief have not stopped or even slowed down) this was considered the best way to clear out the millions of foreclosures that "had to happen."

But if we start with the correct supposition that most of the documents used in collection and foreclosures are fake, then judges would return to the old style of scrutinizing the documents proffered by the banks and send the bank's lawyer packing because the chain of title did NOT match up. THAT would have cleared the dockets much faster as banks realized they would not be able to get their "get out of jail" ticket that came in the form of an official court judgment and an official forced sale of the property. The implication is that everything that preceded the foreclosure judgment and sale was indeed legal. But as we have seen, neither the judgments nor the sales should have been allowed.

It is understandable that judges would lean toward the banks. The logic of the existence of a loan and therefore the existence of a creditor certainly is more appealing than the logic of fake transactions starting with origination and continuing right up to the time of the foreclosure sale. So judges went with the easier, more logical inference that the banks could be trusted even if some of their paperwork was dubious. It may have seemed like the right thing to do, but they got it wrong.

Had judges exercised their inherent right and duty to scrutinize the documents submitted in a foreclosure action, even if the foreclosure was unopposed, there would never have been a foreclosure crisis, even if there might have been a crisis in the bond market where the nominal value of "derivatives" far exceeded their actual value. But if we ever want to truly get over this and not just think it is over because the banks pay for articles announcing the end of the foreclosure crisis, then we must start with fundamentals.

The fundamentals are that in virtually all cases where there are transfers and originations of loans, there was no actual event in the real world. The documents represent a fictional story --- and the people who paid for it are all the investors in such derivatives (worthless) and all the millions of homeowners who were trapped by fraudulent lending practices, fake representations, and appraisals. Secondarily the rest of society paid for it with entire neighborhoods crashing and in many tens of thousands of cases demolished after the alleged "bank" or "servicer" told the homeowner that they didn't qualify for a settlement (modification) or that the "investor" had rejected the modification.

The truth is that the investor never heard of the homeowner and the homeowner never heard of the investor. It was all in the province of intermediaries acting as though there was a person behind the curtain when the space was void. The Trusts are empty and no amount of "re-securitizing" into new trusts (whose existence is only suggested on paper with no property entrusted to the "Trustee") will change the fact that, as between the homeowner and the party named on the note and mortgage, nothing ever actually happened.

Thus the Wells Fargo practice of creating false accounts for their own reasons was merely the outgrowth of the creation of fake loan accounts, fake servicing, and fake foreclosures.

If Wells Fargo wanted to rehabilitate its image, it failed miserably. Senator Elizabeth Warren wants the board of directors removed. Congresswoman Maxine Waters says she’s writing a bill to break up big banks that abuse consumers. And there have been some real consequences for Wells over the past year, beyond threats: They lost tens of millions of dollars when cities and states curtailed business with them after the fake account scandal. Senior managers have been sacked, and even the CEO stepped down, a rarity in an age of fleeting corporate accountability.

None of this is good enough. We habitually allow giant corporations to harm customers, employees, and the economy with relative impunity. That’s despite the fact that we, the public, give corporations the ability to exist. Every legal corporation must obtain a corporate charter, a written contract detailing the company’s structure and objectives. And the same government that grants charters can take them away, and should, if the corporation repeatedly violates the law.

Though politicians of all stripes claim to support corporate accountability, and those on the left frequently campaign on the issue, calls for a corporate death penalty are extremely rare. But the modern enforcement regime makes a mockery of the law, as governments feign powerlessness against an entity they themselves created by granting it a charter. Simply put, if Wells Fargo keeps using its power as a bank to rip off customers, it shouldn’t be a bank anymore.

Editor's Note:
I don't think President Trump would ever sign a bill like this even if it passed but this shows you precisely why we need to clean house in Congress ASAP. They are the worst kind of snakes.

Congress submits bill making it illegal to hold cash, Bitcoin, or other assets outside of a bank without informing them in writing

Just as the War on Drugs was never actually about slowing down or stopping the import and use of illegal narcotics, so too was the spurious War on Terror not about stopping individuals or groups from inciting violence for political means. In fact, we already know that U.S. agencies have funded, trained, and armed the very terror groups that are supposedly on the FBI’s Terror Watch List when they supported them in the taking over of Libya, and in the attemp to take over Syria.

So the question then has to be asked… what are the purposes behind the ideological wars against drugs and terror really all about? Well, since the real victims going back to the 1970’s when the War on Drugs was instituted by President Richard Nixon have been the millions of Americans incarcerated for victimless crimes, and the billions of dollars seized without a trial in what is known as Civil Forfeiture, then it is fairly obvious who these wars were really focused against.

And since the advent of the Patriot Act, which hasn’t stopped a single terrorist or terror event following the terror attacks on 9/11, the ability of Americans to do as they please with their own money has been stymied in the government’s attempt to monitor and regulate every single transaction individuals choose to conduct.

Most people don't know the Federal Reserve is not a government entity. It's no more Federal than Federal Express. It's owned and controlled by the largest private banks. They are using their control of the Fed to destroy the dollar, our economy and wipe out the middle class so they can replace it with a system and currency they have even MORE control of. If we don't shut down the bankers, the Federal Reserve, this nation is history! The Congress can REPEAL THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT and return control over our currency to "We The People." We have to take back control of Congress and DEMAND THIS HAPPEN in the upcoming election!